This Simple Technology Could Save The World In Two Ways
The Climate crisis & world hunger could be a thing of the past.

We are staring down the barrel of some of the most colossal challenges humans have ever faced. Our way of life is literally destroying the planet, and we are struggling to adapt fast enough to avoid a global catastrophe. Not only that, but global food insecurity is increasing as more and more people don’t know where their next meal will come from. However, a recent study has shown that a surprisingly simple technology, enhanced rock weathering (EW), solves both of these pressing issues.
So, what is EW? Well, it starts in the clouds.
Carbon dioxide is soluble, so vast amounts of our emissions are absorbed by clouds. Once absorbed, the carbon dioxide reacts with the water, forming carbonic acid, which falls as acid rain. A very abundant type of rock, basalt, strongly reacts with carbonic acid. This turns the carbonic acid into soluble carbonate minerals, which are washed out to the sea. As such, the weathering of basalt rock actually pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and buries it in the ocean. But, as the basalt weathers down, it also releases minerals trapped within it, like phosphorus, magnesium and calcium, fertilising the surrounding land.
This process is usually incredibly slow, hence why basalt landscapes don’t disappear after a good rainstorm. But we can enhance this weathering (hence the name) by pulverising basalt and increasing its surface area, then spreading it over areas of land that get a lot of rainfall, like farmland. In theory, by doing this, we can sequester a significant amount of carbon out of the atmosphere and negate the need for carbon-intense fertiliser.
Previous studies have repeatedly demonstrated how effective EW is at carbon sequestration. The answer is very! But, they haven’t studied how this technique will affect the crops. You see, rocks can have a load of impurities in them and even toxic metals! This could negate the effect of the fertiliser, and the impurities, which could be harmful to use, could find their way into the harvest.
This is where a new study by David Beerling, a pioneer of EW, comes in. From 2016 to 2020, his team conducted EW field trails on a maize farm in the heart of the US Corn Belt, and they have just published their results. Unsurprisingly, they found that EW sequestered a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide, around 3–4 metric tons per hectare per year! But more importantly, there was no significant increase in the content of trace metals in the harvested maize, while the soil had increased levels of nutrients, and the maize crop yield increased by 12 to 16%!
In other words, they found that not only does EW capture a load of carbon, but it’s also safe to use on farms and can dramatically increase the amount of food we can grow per hectare!
Now, with those figures, it’s difficult to understand how significant these findings are, so let’s contextualise them.
There are currently 1.6 billion hectares of farmland worldwide. This means that if we used EW on every farmland in the world, we could capture 5.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year (by scaling up Beerling’s results). That’s roughly 16% of our annual emissions and 70% of the annual carbon capture capacity we need by 2050 to reach net-zero.
Moreover, the world currently produces 2 billion tonnes of maize annually. This means that in our hypothetical scenario of global EW adoption, we would have an extra 320 million tonnes of maize each year. That additional amount of maize has enough calories to feed 1.3 billion people for an entire year! Currently, 700 million people worldwide are in food insecurity, so this crop yield increase can help us feed them without damaging our environment by expanding farmland. Alternatively, climate change is predicted to reduce maize crop yields by 24% by 2030, as the changing and ever more extreme climate damages the crops. EW could be an efficient way to mitigate this loss and protect our current food supply.
So, can EW save the world? I’d like to think it can, but I know it won’t. There is already more than enough food to feed everyone on Earth and feed them well. Starvation is now a matter of us choosing to let it happen, and we are choosing for hundreds of millions to go hungry. Moreover, EW still has a way to go before it can be widely adopted. After all, where is all that basalt going to come from? Either way, these new findings give us a glimmer of hope that the future might be more rosey than we thought.
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Sources: PNAS, Phys, Sheffield University, Will Lockett, NASA, Springer, Our Wold In Data, Act Against Hunger, IRENA, The Dairy News Global